Thoughts on Safer Seas

In Season 10, Sea of Thieves is introducing a new game mode. Coming in December 2023, we will gain access to Safer Seas, which works similarly to sailing the normal High Seas, except it’s your own private instance. Basically, by playing Safer Seas, you can explore the Sea of Thieves with your crew and no one else. It’s basically a private server, although you still need to be connected to the internet.

However, despite containing the entirety of the Sea of Thieves, playing Safer Seas has some downsides. The most noticeable change is that you earn 70% less gold. While that does seem harsh, there’s no one else in Safer Seas who can take away your gold, so there’s no risk to stacking up loot and selling it all in one go. On top of this, you can’t raise an emissary flag in Safer Seas, and Reapers’ Bones and Athena’s Fortune are disabled pretty much entirely. Emissaries rely on there being other ships around, they are supposed to be more risk for more reward, but as there is no risk on Safer Seas, the reward has been dropped massively. You can also only get to level 40 with the remaining Emissaries, meaning you can’t reach Pirate Lord on your own. And, obviously, you can’t do Hourglass battles in Safer Seas.

What you can do though are PvE things, as well as Tall Tales and fishing. While emissary reputation is locked down, you’ll still be able to do their quests. Many commendations can also be earned, but anything emissary-related will most likely be blocked off.

Despite these massive downsides though, there seems to be a mostly positive reaction to the announcement. All over the Sea of Thieves subreddit and discords, people are really excited to be able to play without any interruptions. I’ve seen a huge amount of people claim that this is exactly what they wanted and they don’t care about the downsides, they just don’t want to be attacked. And according to the subreddit, anyone who isn’t peaceful is automatically a griefer or an ultra-sweat that instantly kills you as soon as you’ve spawned. There’s been an outcry for PvE only servers for years, despite Rare being stubborn on the subject. While there is a public outcry though, it is worth considering that the more vocal communities aren’t the majority. That being said, there’s a lot of celebration of people finally getting what they want.

However, I think there are some downsides to this. The most obvious being a massive decline of people in normal servers. Why would you play with any sort of risk, when you can play with no risk at all in Safer Seas? Sure, there are downsides, but those can be overcome by simply being patient. The Sea of Thieves is a game of patience and grinding, after all. But Safer Seas completely ignores the title of the game, Sea of Thieves, and there won’t be as many Thieves in the Seas if everyone just plays on easy mode.

It’s also possible that there would be a population crash. If a large number of players switches to Safer Seas, then people playing in PvP seas may also leave as well. This would just leave Hourglass people, the handful of people who actually like the risk, and people trying to get to Pirate Legend. Oh and new players who hit the wrong button.

More importantly, I can see people jumping back in to High Seas to reach Pirate Legend, but there’s nothing stopping them going back to Safer Seas once they’ve gotten what they need. Safer Seas will be a crutch to new players, who won’t ever learn anything about PvP or how to defend yourself. You can learn a little by shooting at skeleton and ghost ships, but managing things like positioning and when to go in for close combat are only things you learn by playing against other people. We end up with no real reason to want to improve, because Safer Seas means you don’t need these skills any more.

But it seems pretty clear that many players don’t want to do any PvP at all, despite Rare (and some players) wanting otherwise. That’s why the downsides to playing on Safer Seas are so harsh. Because Rare is doing this to bring players back, even if it risks damaging sailing in the High Seas. I’m sure there will be a player bump for a bit, but I worry that maybe PvE only might not have enough to have people sticking around.

As for me, I won’t play on Safer Seas. Despite me normally being a coward, I do like the risk while playing normally. You never know what might happen out there. Plus, I have gold to earn and emissaries I need to rank up. Looking at you, Athena’s Fortune…